emacs

Those that know me, know that I preach the use of vi as an editor. Reason being as those who know me might be able to recite: vi is everywhere and doesn’t need to be installed, its very powerful for its size, some jobs demand it! That fact was mentioned to me by someone at Phoenix Linux Users Group meeting, which was call CAT (Chat About Technology; lets go eat CAT, it was a bad joke, but we went with it) someone stated that some GE jobs require the use knowledge of vi, sure enough I went to [http://www.ge.com/careers](GE Careers) and I found in fact some jobs do require it. I later speculated while at NightHawk, that some GE medical modalities only had vi installed. In other jobs, I witnessed administrators stopping work on solving a problem to install an editor that they could use, literally blew my mind. That’s why I try to inform people that they //at least// need some kind of working knowledge of vi and nano, but not so much nano since the editor has a command legend at the bottom.

This brings me to the topic of this blog entry I think that I’m going to revisit emacs, considering it hit it version 25. Honestly my very first editor was emacs, I would always press F10 and a drop down menu would be presented where I could function. This was back in Redhat 6 on my 486’s, I didn’t know much then and had trouble finding the assistance I needed, but emacs more than helped. Now I used to give emacs a hard time about the key sequences, but with F10 that can be managed. But I have come to try and use them more often since bash by default uses emacs like shortcuts. Additionally, aside from the large size of the editor (sometimes up to 120MB installed) it isn’t installed everywhere, emacs is a fine editor behaves exactly as you would expect. I have learned about emacs has something called https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode mode, which basically allows it to run locally and send all the changes to the files over SSH. I’m not sure I would do all my editing that way, but I could do some editing of Chef cookbooks. I have tried to use org mode, but I think I have finalized on task warrior, more on that later; I have a task entry for it! Lastly emacs has [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil](evil mode), which allows for it to act like vi in some aspects.